Product-Oriented Portfolio Leaders...

• Model agile leadership by fostering collaboration, decentralized decision-making, and servant leadership to inspire trust and empower teams.
• Align portfolio objectives, vision, and strategies with organizational goals, ensuring they are outcome-oriented, measurable, and continuously updated to reflect strategic needs.
• Organize value streams and teams around products and strategic themes in a way that empowers them to run fast with minimal dependencies and maximum local decision making, leading to fast learning and improving the likelihood of great product outcomes.
• Optimize portfolio processes to ensure smooth flow, align governance with lean principles, and promote a sustainable pace for long-term health and efficiency.
• Proactively mitigate risks through empiricism, experimentation, and evidence-based decision-making.
• Manage the organization's most significant initiatives modeling Focus, Flow, Outcome-orientation and Empiricism as well as decentralized control/empowerment through trusting teams and value streams to manage other work.

Does this look familiar?

Honestly, You could come up with this list yourself. All I did was think through what applying the Agility Principles for Portfolio Leaders would look like.

But I think its a nice example of the power of starting with principles rather than mechanics/practices.

Does it make sense for Portfolio Leaders to use Portfolio Kanbans? Epics? OKRs? Guardrails/Boundaries? Team Topologies? Very often, it does. But these are all much more powerful when you start with the intent and then choose what works in the context.

So, instead of a checklist of practices you’re using (or not) – how about reflecting on whether leadership behaviors are aligned with agility principles?

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Yours,

Yuval "Coaching With Agility Principles" Yeret

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